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Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:47 pm

by albadross

Given the recent work on the Wintermute 2D engine and the passing of Wintermute 2.5 & 3D to ResidualVM, I am wondering if the 2D engine could become officially supported in the next release of ScummVM.

I have completed over 35 Wintermute 2D games, using the long-standing (ScummVM 2.0.0 and earlier) engines, so that I feel it is stable enough.

Unfortunately, recent builds have changed the savegame file structure, rendering many/all(?) of my savegames unusable. I do intend to replay these games in the future, but not until the engine is officially supported and, hopefully, changes like this are less likely to happen.

David

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:40 pm

by MusicallyInspired

This is in totally the wrong subforum.

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

That said, the project does try where possible to load original savegame formats and avoid breaking older savegame compatibility or allow them to be migrated as this does help bug hunting and dealing with regression type bugs. Though this comes down to the engine developer(s) and is not always possible i.e. some original games did not save in a way which is portable such as the savegames being a memory dump which would thus be specific to the endian and machine which this was done on.

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 3:32 pm

by digitall

I took a look at the Wintermute engine code and I can't spot any change where "recent builds have changed the savegame file structure" ...

@albadross: When did this start occuring for you? i.e. when did you create the savegame that you now can not load?

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:23 pm

by albadross

I am sorry if this is totally the wrong forum – maybe I didn’t understand the forum description

I also do not remember me complaining the savegames no longer work – I have always been willing to replay the games. Considering the number of Wintermute games I have played and the warning messages at the start, you could have thought I was well aware of the risks I was taking.

A lot of work was done on the Wintermute 2D engine in the month of June 2019 and so I closely followed the log of the many commits at that time. Although I cannot immediately find it, I am sure one of the commits stated that the file structure of the savegame file had been changed. That is obviously when I found my savegames (in particular, the Carol Reed savegames built up over the last three years) no longer worked. To help you pinpoint the problem, I copy an email I received on June 16. I believe the single byte problem mentioned was the indirect cause of the change to the savegame file structure.

If this wasn't the cause of it, the problem certainly occurred around that time.

Thank you for your interest. The Wintermute 2D engine has given me a lot of enjoyment over the years, for which I am grateful.

David

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:33 pm

by albadross

If it is of any help, I do have an old savegame at the start of Carol Reed 9 – Cold Case Summer that works on ScummVM 2.0.0 but not the latest 2.1.0 git, and a new savegame at the same place using a recent 2.1.0 git. The newer savegame file is considerably larger than the old one. I assumed that was because the help system conversations were being now saved.

Re: Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:52 pm

by albadross

And, by the way, I am not asking for any changes to the engine. From my preliminary testing, the Carol Reed hint system now works! Which is how it should be.